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June 16

Happy Summer everyone! We are back with another update and this time our focus was based on the theme of Fix and Polish. There are plenty of changes throughout the log below to sink your teeth into, so I won’t go into detail and let it speak for itself. Enjoy!

Update 316 Changelog

Gameplay

Onos

Boneshield has been redesigned and repurposed:

No longer regenerates armor in any circumstances

Now allows movement (speed of 3, which is roughly half) while active

Celerity bonus does not increase Boneshield movement speed, but still provides all speed bonuses otherwise.

All Frontal (approx. 110 degree forward-facing cone of Onos) damage from bullet-based weapons is reduced by 80%. With default FOV settings, if the attacker is on screen the damage will be reduced by Bonesield.

No innate health/armor regeneration while Boneshield is active. Healing from a Gorge or other source is still allowed.

Does not consume energy to initiate, but costs 22 energy per second while active. It also requires a minimal amount of energy to start. Use your energy wisely.

Minor cooldown of 0.4 seconds after being used

Energy does not regenerate while Boneshield is active. This includes energy recuperation bonus from Shifts.

These changes should provide utility to Boneshield without it being overpowered or removing the need for team composition, such as Gorges healing you. You can utilize it defensively (blocking entrance to hive room) or offensively (decoy / bait to assist teammates, or faking out an enemy in 1v1). We feel this improves the nature of Boneshield while adding more fun, variation, and tactical gameplay choices.

This reverts back to Build 253 values to have the Onos commit more to a map position to hold it, instead of being able to easily rotate between two positions and therefore be the jack of all trades in the late game.

Improved Gorge Bellyslide

Increased max belly sliding speed to 14 from 13.

Decreased belly slide cooldown from 1.5 to 1 second.

Reduced slide friction on infestation from 0.068 to 0.039.

Reduced slide energy cost from 25 to 20.

Increased belly slide control from 10 to 18.

Speed loss sliding uphill is reduced by 25%.

Decreased the air friction from 0.8 to 0.2 so the Gorge doesn't move like a brick while jumping.

These changes allow Gorge movement in general to be easier to control and slightly faster, to give Gorge players a powerful tool to avoid previously lethal situations, and to allow for easier use of keeping up with teammates and being a combat gorge.

Fade Personal Res cost increased to 37 from 35

This change restores the Fade timings to from before the Pres rate change.

Alien structures grow only twice as slow without a drifter or gorge now, instead of three times as slow.

The growth speed punishment for not using a drifter to build was mostly affecting new commanders. So we increased the build speed without drifters so teams without an experienced commander are less punished, but can still notice the difference in build times.

Focus upgrade attack speed changed to a static 33%

The focus attack speed was changing from 16% to 33% to 50% with each veil level, and this created inconsistent attack timings to learn during combat. The damage bonus is unchanged, however. This nerfs focus with 1 veil, but buffs it for 3 veils.

Tweaks / Improvements

Swapped the button positions for "Server Browser" and "Training" in the Play Menu, to make the mouse travel distance significantly less from the main menu to the play menu.

Added Onos Boneshield ricochet FX to better communicate when the ability is active.

The red arrow damage indicator will now quickly animate and fade, and was made larger as well. This should make it easier to notice and react to recently received damage from multiple directions.

Owned Babblers show up grayed out for the gorge at the Babbler Status HUD elements even when they are not actively attached to the owner. This helps to keep track how many of your babblers are still alive. (Thanks to jack^)

The crash reporter now sends the crash reports with a few further details to our new crash reporter backend. Hopefully this will allow us to track down some of the more common crashes we and our playtesters are unable to reproduce. Thanks to everybody who sent us crash report via discord, the forum and emails the last month!

Rookies (players below level 25) will now see a popup that highly recommends they play the tutorial, whenever they open the play menu. (occurs once per restart of NS2)

Rookies are now able to join all servers without any further restriction. However Quick Play will still favor rookie only servers for them.

Quickplay now ranks servers you’ve played in the last 10 minutes as less favorable

Improved the art style of some menu pop up windows.

Alien commander bots will now re-cyst if they lose part of their cyst chain that results in damaging a structure, and will nutrient mist if needed.

Alien commander bots will no longer spam cysts like they’re fireworks on the 4th of July.

Added a notice about the required tech to the description of each weapon or class in the marine buy menu in case they are not available yet. So players understand why they can’t already buy a certain weapon.

Removed some outdated tip videos and updated a few in-game tooltip strings (Thanks to Kash)

Fixes

Fixed a bug with dynamic mesh rendering using DirectX 11 that caused the clients to crash when players tried to place gorge webs or a sentry battery.

Fixed that hallucination caused a server script error when they tried to attack a target.

Fixed that the training link in the play menu opened the last visited main menu window

Fixed a bug in the animation system that would, in rare cases, cause some of the "Infinite bone coords" error spam.

Fixed that the skulk animation got disorientated after repeatedly jumping in a short time. This caused Skulk to sometimes clip through walls while wall jumping. (Thanks twiliteblue)

Fixed that Quick Join didn’t find any servers if you have joined all available ones less than 10 minutes ago.

Fixed that the Friends tab of the server browser didn’t show any servers. Note, you still need to be logged into Steam Friends for this to function.

Fixed a script that occurred when babblers attached to an aliens after the babler owner had died. (Thanks twiliteblue)

Fixed that the Death and score number display counts overlapped at the first person spectator HUD (Thanks to Keats)

Fixed that the status of techs that dependent on tech with a higher tech Id was not updated when the status of the dependency changed. E. g. if an observatory is killed and rebuilt, you could not build or research phase gates until two observatories are built.

Fixed an issue which caused the Marine HUD to be stuck on the screen after spectating an exo.

Maps

Cleaned up the pathing meshes on all maps. There were issues on some maps where structures could not be placed where it looked like they should be able to.

Docking

Gorges can now place tunnels behind the counter in Terminal.

Mineshaft

Added an invisible block between Operations and The Gap to prevent Lerks from spiking marine extractors from a location the marines could not reach. It was very annoying.

May 26

Summer is finally upon us and with that the forthcoming mighty Steam Sale. Sales usually bring in a lot of new faces to the game and over the years, we have worked hard to make changes that help those new to NS to learn and enjoy the game as all of us do. Please welcome these new players as they become familiar with the game.

With Update 315 we have consolidated the PLAY menu, updated the server browser and added new help screens for players. While in game you can now bring up an overlay that explains your individual player or lifeform controls all based on your key binds. We hope that this feature will help to better explain abilities and even upgrades to new players.

Alien egg spawning has been adjusted to scale with players which should lead to better spawning and encourage alien hive expansion too! Some additional improvements were made to gorge tunnels to allow for quicker and easier placement. See more about the gameplay changes in the changelog below.

We are also aware of some stability issues that players were experiencing in the previous update. We have worked to resolve those with this release and hope that this provides a better experience for those of you dealing with this problem.

Update 315 Changelog

Gameplay

Alien Egg Spawn

Every hive spawns an egg every 13 secs instead of only one hive at a time.

Scales down with the team’s player count:

6 players: 13

9 players: 8.6

10 players: 9.75

12 players: 7.5

Every hive can spawn up to 2 eggs (was 3).

The hive’s egg hatch tech spawns 2 eggs (didn’t scale previously).

² Scales up with the team’s player count:

6 players: 2

9 players: 3

10 players: 3

12 players: 4

MG

Increased base damage to 8 from 6.

Decreased damage bonus against players to 150% from 200%

Decreased costs to 20 pres.

Gorge Tunnel

The gorge tunnel is now less “picky” about it’s placement so you can drop it in areas with slightly rougher terrain.

Made wall walking less unpredictable for skulks

Skulks can sneak around sharp corners on the ceiling much more reliably now.

Tweaks / Improvements

Added a new Play Menu

Replaced “Play Now” and “Server Browser” links on main menu with a single “Play” button.

Menu creates more visibility of the arcade tab by giving it a nice, big button, alongside the server browser button, training button, and play now button.

Can’t decide on a server to play on? Try out the big, flashy Play Now button. You can’t miss it!

Added an in-game help screen

Displays useful (and silly) information about the weapons/abilities you have currently equipped.

Modders: see SDK section below for how to “play nicely” with the help screen. (don’t worry, it’s easy! 🙂 )

Fixed that the warmup mode started the game after limit of 12 players was reached (Thanks to Person8880 who fixed this via the Shine mod previously)

Removed the leftover links to the deprecated hive website in the main menu

SDK

Declared some missing optional constants for the ScoringMixin and BaseModelMixin

Added proper support for Lua style multi line comments

Help Screen

When the help screen is displayed, all other GUI elements are hidden (to avoid ugly overlapping and undesirable effects).

Example mod showing how to properly implement this: Dropbox, Github

Cinematic Editor: Fixed a hang caused by zooming in too far into the graph window.

Overview: The program will not whine as easily for mismatched minimap_extents dimensions.

Added a function GUI.Message(string), which is the exact same thing as Shared.Message(string), except that it is accessible from inside a GUIView VM.

GUIView objects can now be set to render “always” (past behavior), “once”, or “never.”. Useful for scenarios where a gui view is rendering something complex to a texture, but only needs to do it once.

GUIView render targets are now cleared with transparent black, instead of opaque black.

Added two new functions, Client.GetLastRenderResetTime(), and Client.GetLastPresentTime(). These are useful for determining if certain resources need to be reloaded/rendered. For example, see “lua/menu/FancyGUIViewManager.lua”.

DynamicRenderMesh objects are no longer emptied when the game is alt+tabbed.

GUIItem: Added GetTextureWidth() and GetTextureHeight(), which return the width/height of the texture, in pixels, or -1 if there is no texture assigned to the GUIItem.

Added numerous enums, a few constants, and a boatload of associated Client functions to integrate Steamworks Lobbies functionality (see docs/ClientLoaded.json)

Added a function GUIItem::GetCanFontRenderString(string fontName, string text) which allows you to determine if the given font name is capable of displaying all characters of the given string (eg some fonts only have numbers, or maybe the string has non latin characters, etc.)

Reviews

"NS2 is a genius mash of Counter Strike and Starcraft" – Kotaku"This is getting close to my idea of the ultimate game" – Machinima

About This Game

Natural Selection 2 pits alien against human in an action-packed struggle for survival. Wield devastating weaponry as a Frontiersman marine, or become the xenomorph as a deadly Kharaa lifeform.

Strategy Meets Shooter

Natural Selection 2 is a First Person Shooter and Real Time Stategy game rolled into one! Each team, alien and human, has a Commander. The Commander looks down on the battlefield and issues orders, places structures, collects resources, researches technology, and deploys abilities.

Here are some gameplay examples: A human Commander could drop health packs and ammunition to a trapped marine squad, and deploy sentry guns to help them defend their position. Or an alien Commander could grow a new Hive to spread infestation throughout newly captured territory, allowing more alien eggs to spawn...

Two Unique Sides

Aliens players choose to evolve into one of five lifeforms: The fast, fearsome Skulk can run on walls and deliver massive damage with its jaws. Lerks fly and deploy gasses to support their teammates in battle. Gorges heal other lifeforms and build tunnels, hydra turrets, walls, and other tactical structures. Fades blink in and out of battle, picking off marines with giant scythes. Finally, the giant Onos is so massive and so tough, that even entire marine squads can't take it down.

Marines wield rifles, shotguns, grenade launchers, pistols, and other weapons. Cluster grenades can clear ventilation shafts of sneaky Skulks, flamethrowers make short work of alien structures and infestation, and boosts dropped by the Commander increase combat effectiveness.

When attacking on foot doesn't cut it, marines can construct hulking Exosuits wielding miniguns and railguns, and equip jetpacks for high speed assaults on alien Hives.

Long Term Development

Mod Tools Come Standard

Natural Selection 2 comes with all the tools we used to make the game. All game code is open source. That means you can create, and play, an endless variety of mods. Publish, share, and download mods from the Steam Workshop, and automatically download mods when you join modded games.

Digital Deluxe Edition

Digital Deluxe Edition includes:

Official Soundtrack - 1 hour of tribal, industrial music composed by David John and Simon Chylinski

Digital Art Book - 40+ pages of art by Cory Strader, including environments, creatures, weapons and more